Ranking Six iPhone apps

***************If you look at this post and say "fuck, that's long" then go ahead and skip to the bottom. It's cool, but only this time.******************

Alright, guys. Let me say something here. Well, you have to let me say something, this is my blog, and you don't really have to listen/read what I write, and that's fine. But this time, I want you to listen. Wait, I mean read. Pretend I'm talking and you are listening. That'll work.

I'm a big fan of a social networking service called Twitter. Huge fan, in fact. I think it is easily the most important and useful social networking service ever devised. It allows you to be connected to the world at a moments notice, provided that you are following the proper Twitter accounts. For example, follow @cnnbrk, and get breaking news stories the moment they are reported, wherever you are. Follow me (@bradperala) and get useless complaints and a debatable level of quality observational humor, on the go! Follow @Altpress and get all the alternative music news as it breaks. The list goes on and on and on.

Anyway, back in April, I upgraded my Twitter capabilities by investing in the iPhone 3GS. I use the iPhone for a lot of things, but the main thing I use it for, to be honest, is Tweeting. When I got the phone, I immediately downloaded three apps. Facebook, Pandora and Echofon, which is a Twitter app, before I left the parking lot of the AT&T parking lot. Well, I knew there were other iPhone Twitter apps available, but I wanted the first one I saw so I got that one. Also, I had done my research on the best and worst apps available, and they said this one was quite good, so I went for it.

Sometimes I like to look at what service people had used for their tweets, and I noticed that a lot came from "web" and a lot came from "txt," while others came from sources I was unfamiliar with. So I was curious as to why someone would send their tweets from services other than the ones I knew about/used. I began to download a few apps I had heard of and check them out as to see what I could possibly be missing out on. I ended up with six apps, including the original Echofon that I would test out and see which app was best. Then I would recommend the best one to my friends. I began the test on Wednesday, and I think I'm done now. I've seen all I need to see to formulate an opinion. The results have a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.

The six apps are: Echofon, Twitter for iPhone, Twitterific, Hootsuite, Seesmic, and Tweetdeck.

Let me start off by saying that I have used only Echofon for the past 4 months, so I naturally base all the opinions of the other apps off comparisons to that. I tried to be objective, but I just like Echofon so much, it's hard not to just find the things on the other apps that are different to it, and not like it. I wanted to see if the others were as easy to use, while possibly offering further service. What I found is that they pretty much don't. While some of the apps were neat, and clean and easy to use, they just didn't compare to Echofon. The way Echofon is set up is so convenient and easy to read. I would check my updates after a while, using a different app each time to see how it loads my many friends updates. Most of the time, I would check the updates on all six apps, which was time-consuming, but I had to do it that way. Some of the apps, the way their color schemes are set up, I would read them, then read the same updates on another app and wonder if I had even read it. I must have just skimmed over it. I don't know that's a personal thing I guess. Let's get down to it before this gets waaaay go long-winded.

The Good In Each:

Twitterific:

This app is probably the silver medal winner in this whole thing. What I like about it? It makes a sweet bird chirp every time you open it. There's this feature in there where you can see who has replied to any user. That's nice so you can get a feel of how many people reply to users, and get a better feeling of what their dealing with as far as that goes. Not entirely useful, but I like to know those things. You might not care, but I liked that. They color-code the background of Tweets involving you, so as you're scrolling though, you can clearly see the things pertaining to you. My brother uses it. When I had a problem figuring something out, and tweeted my problem, the actually replied to me on how to fix it. Big bonus points to them for that. That means they care about the users. They wanted to help me. If I had never gotten used to Echofon, Twitterific would be the winner.

Twitter for iPhone:

I like the sound effects when you reload the feed. It does this slide and pop sound thing, and it's neat. Loads quickly. Simple layout.

Tweetdeck:

I found it extremely easy to rifle through my tweets and list/replies with this app. I also have Tweetdeck for the desktop on my computer, so there's a nice little tie-in there. When you mark tweets as "seen" it make a cool clicking sound that makes me happy and want to hear it again.

Seesmic:

Simple and clean. Nothing special about it, but in a good way. If you wanted an app, any app, then I would not fight you if you wanted to get this one.

Hootsuite:

This app probably has the best Facebook section of all the ones that offer it. If you haven't checked you're twitter in a while, it'll just load the most recent tweets unless you ask it to load more, so therefore, it loads faster than most others. It also doesn't load until you ask it to do so.

Echofon:

Clearly indicates #hashtags, links and replies by putting them in a different color and font in the timeline, not just if you select that tweet. Shows how many new tweets and replies you have at the bottom with a little red circle and the number inside it. This aspect is only on Echofon, and I really wish all the other ones had it. When you want to tag someone in a tweet, after you type the @ and a letter, it shows a little bar on the bottom of the people you follow so you can quickly choose the one you want, instead of trying to remember how to spell someones ridiculous username. This is also true for #hashtags. just type the # and a letter and it'll remember all the things you hashtaged in the past, and suggest it. Most other app do not do any these things. You can open pictures and links directly from the timeline, reducing the amount of times you have to fumble with trying to click links on the tiny iPhone screen. It gives you a push notification when other Echofon users reply or mention you, which is really nice.

The Things I don't like:

Tweetdeck crashed more often than any other app. Twitterific has a HUGE add on the top of it, and that's annoying. Hootsuite you have to pull the screen down to refresh instead of it just doing it on it's own, like some other apps do. I see nothing to complain about with Seesmic, except that it doesn't have the colored text to indicate usernames, links, pics, hashtags, or mentions. Twitter for iPhone would be great if it told you how many tweets you have to read. If you exit on the replies page, when you open it again, it's still on the replies page and that confused me a number of times. Twitter for iPhone and Twitterific are the only two to offer the landscape view which is nice because some prefer to read stuff the long way sideways instead of the long way vertical. Seesmic doesn't tell you who has retweeted this random tweet, so you have to open it to find out. dumb. Hootsuite, Seesmic and Tweetdeck open pictures as the entire webpage in which it was uploaded to instead of the other three which just open the picture to the full screen's capacity, which the latter three is much better, IMHO.

So really, it just boils down to preference. If you want my advice on which iPhone twitter app to use, may I suggest Echofon, and Twitterific is a close second. Both are really easy to use and stuff. The Twitterific people replied to me, which goes a long way in my book, and it has cool sound effects.

Bottom line, if you skipped all that review jazz up there and just want the meat and potatos of the whole thing it goes like this. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the highest:

Echofon: 10

Twitterific: 9.2

Twitter for iPhone: 8.1

Seesmic: 7.6

Tweetdeck: 7

Hootsuite: 6.8

As you can see, you can't really go wrong here. Whichever app you choose, they're all alright, I just found Echofon to offer the most advantages versus disadvantages. With such a simple service as Twitter, you shouldn't really have too much going on with the app. Simplicity is key, yet make the experience enjoyable for the user, and Echofon and Twitterific accomplish that. The end.

Today, I Learn How to Spell "Deficiency"

For those of you who don't know me very well, you may not know that I am a vegetarian. I don't remember if I talked about this before, but if I have, read it again, bitches. Anyhow I've been a vegetarian since June 7th, 2008. That's the easy date to remember of 6/7/08. I would also fall into the sub-category of "ovo-lacto vegetarian" as I consume eggs and cheese while drinking milk and other assorted dairy products. Anyway, that's just a little background info before we get under way here today.

I went to the grocery store this morning and was grabbing some things to eat at work this week. As I was checking out, the cashier commented that I had a lot of good things there and that it was going to be hot, for whatever reason mentioning that would be useful. I decided to crack a joke about how this basket of food was a "lazy vegetarian's grocery basket." She suddenly go very serious and asked me if I was taking a B12 supplement. I replied that I was not, and she proceeded to tell me how important it was to take B12, and that if I don't, my spine will erode and my brain will stop working, in a much nicer way that I just described. She encouraged me to pick up some supplements the next time I go shopping, and that others that she has reccomended to start taking supplements have thanked her for helping them out.

This struck me, folks. I suddenly realized that I may be deficient of vitamin B12, as I have been vegetarian for so long, and that's not "normal." It struck me because it is possible, and I know nothing about vitamin B12. So that got me thinking, how in the hell would I be able to tell if I was deficient of a vitamin or mineral? Would I feel it? Have I been feeling it and not even know it? The only time I was for sure deficient in something was the time in early 2009 when I decided to dabble in vegan-ism, and cut out eggs and dairy, only drinking almond or rice milk. After a few weeks of that, my fingernails started breaking off, and chipping. I realized that something was for sure wrong, so I put the eggs and dairy back in my diet, and haven't had a problem since.

But what if I was doing something to myself without even knowing it? I decided to look up B12 once I got home. Symptoms of deficiency and good sources of it. Turns out the best source for B12 is liver, but that's totally out of the question. You get about %750 or you DV in a serving of liver. Two reasons I ain't eating no liver, One, even when I ate meat, that's gross, and two, it's meat. I don't eat meat.

You can get supplements, and that's all fine and dandy, but as I had read before, you can basically find all the vitamins and minerals you need from plants, weather their exotic like weird seaweed or just a regular old vegetable you would buy at you're grocery store and because it's in it's natural form in the food, it's better for you than a synthetic one made in a lab. Turns out that's not the case for B12 (the source, not the supplement). It is created by living beings, not plants. "Oh, shit" says me. Well, it's a good thing I eat eggs and dairy. So that brought me back to the cashier at Trader Joe's, the one who was concerned about my vitamin deficiencies, and I thought about how much B12 I can get from the foods I eat. (I'm assuming she was assuming that me as a vegetarian, I don't eat eggs or consume dairy. Au contraire, my dear.) Turns out I get all the B12 I need from eating an egg. Boom. Done. No worries. I started reading about the symptoms of the deficiency before even finding out if I had one, which of coarse makes you start feeling all the symptoms, because we're all hypochondriac deep-down.

So yeah, I'll just continue eating eggs. I don't eat animals but I eat eggs, because an egg is not an animal, because an animal is a living thing and life begins at birth, therefore eggs are not animals. (This is a WHOLENOTHER argument that I'm not going into today, but this is how I feel in general. K?) I should be fine. It just weirded me out to think that I might be deficient in something and not even know it. It made me think twice about it. It made me think "is this going to kill me?" And if the answer is yes, then I should probably pay attention to it. This a B12 deficiency can do some serious neurological damage, and quite frankly, I'm not sure I want to experience that, so I'll continue with my current diet choices, and I'll be just fine.

P.S.

Found this, and was grossed out:

Human faeces can contain significant B12. A study has shown that a group of Iranian vegans obtained adequate B12 from unwashed vegetables which had been fertilised with human manure. Faecal contamination of vegetables and other plant foods can make a significant contribution to dietary needs, particularly in areas where hygiene standards may be low. This may be responsible for the lack of aneamia due to B12 deficiency in vegan communities in developing countries.

So eat shit and live?

Soundtrack of my Summer

I wanted to write a quick one this morning because I won't be able to tomorrow. I'm going to Memphis, TN tonight to play a show with my band. It's pretty neat. I'll leave it at that.

I was wondering a few months ago which album, song or songs would become my anthem of the summer. There's always a song or album that when I hear it later, I am immediately brought back to the days of summers past. I wasn't sure which recently purchased album would do the trick this year. I never know what it was until much later, when I hear it again and the memories pour back to me.

It has come from an unexpected place this year. Everyday at work, I listen to a local radio station called Lightning100. I realized they play songs on this station I've never heard before by artists I rarely listen to/have never heard before. I would never listen to these songs or artists on my own, but I needed something that was very work-friendly, so I chose this station. It plays a mix of old and new, and it's on the light rock side, I guess. A lot of Dave Mathews and Counting Crows. That sort of station. Well anyway, they keep playing these handful of songs all the time, and it hit me the other day. These songs, the songs I didn't choose to listen to, are the soundtrack of my summer. Even though its just the crap I listen to at work, these songs will forever be linked to me and the summer of 2010. So I began writing down the song titles and artists names so I can go out and get these songs so I will be able to go acquire them later, in order to look back. Yes, I am planning my future memories of right now. That's how awesome life is right now. I never want to forget these days, and if it's a song that brings it back, then I better be prepared.

It's Both a Galaxy And a Huge Disappointment

I just sat outside with my laptop for a good five minutes. It was sorta in the sun a little bit, and now it's almost too hot to type on. I'm not sure this is a good thing for a computer.

Candy bars are delicious. I had mentioned before how I like Snickers and this is still very true. What I don't get is people that think Milky Way bars are any good. I ate a Milky Way not too long ago and it was gross. Not gross in the way that it would be if you ate a turd or something, but gross in the way that other candy bars are so much better than Milky Way. I have a hard time understanding why one would choose a Milky Way when other options exist. My experience with the Milky Way was one of utter disappointment. You think before you take a bite that it will taste like a Snickers without the peanuts, but it really doesn't. The lack of peanuts is obvious, but it's also the texture. They're so soft and pointless. It's just a mash-up of chocolate and caramel and nougat in your mouth. It's soft, and not easily chewed. I like to chew food, people. Not gum it.

Now I know some people are allergic to peanuts and will never be able to enjoy a delicious Snickers, and the only way they can get something close to it's awesomeness is to eat a Milky Way, and that's fine. But if you have a choice, why would you not go for the best, every time?

I guess it's all a matter of taste preference, but I just don't understand, and probably will never understand why anyone would choose a Milky Way. It's just not very good.

I'm pretty much a fan of all other candy bars, with the exception of 100 Grand. Those are gross too. I haven't eaten one in years, but I made a very strong mental note to never eat one again when I last did. I don't even remember why, I just remember having a very strong opinion on the bar.

Do you like Candy Bars? What is your favorite? Least favorite?

If you like Milky Way, please explain why. I will probably forever disagree with what you have to say about it, but I just want to hear it.

RE: Tribute to the Greatest Blog In The World

****In a strange twist of fate, I wrote this blog in mid February, talking about a blog post that disappeared in December, and for some reason, this blog explaining what had happened when the post was never posted was also never posted. I guess it wasn't meant to be? Well to fucking bad, Blogger. I'm posting it now.****

In regards to The Greatest Blog Ever Written, or the tribute I wrote to it back in December, I want to let you all know that I have found it. I actually found it about ages ago, as I didn't know that the auto-save feature had actually worked on that fateful day. I was saved in my drafts, and I have fully recovered it. Now I am posed with two options. Shelve it forever because the tribute I wrote was so good, and I wouldn't want to disappoint with a lackluster unveiling. Also, my feelings have changed a lot in the past month and a half about the whole thing I wrote about so if I posted it, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. Perhaps I'll leave it as long as I have to, and when I get desperate for something to post, I'll throw out "The Lost Blog."

So if you fire up Keep em' and you see the title "The Lost Blog," you'll know it was a cop out/massive public demand to read what I wrote one time back in December.

It's also funny to read about how I struggled to figure out how to put in hyperlinks, when there is a convenient little button on the top of the compose section of blogger page, that you just highlight the text and insert the site, and it makes the link for you.

So anyway, thanks for readin' today. (this blog was also a cop out, in case you didn't notice.)

Realigning My Focus

Man, so I went back and have been reading older posts from like, April, and going through and adding labels for all the old posts that I didn't do at the time. Well as I scan them over to figure out what to tag it as, I realized that my blog has made a serious turn in the past few weeks. I used to write so good. What happened?

What probably happened is I started thinking the blog was more important to the world than it really is. This is a place to put my thoughts, not necessarily my opinions all the time. Sure, the well placed scathing opinion piece is alright every so often, but I feel like I lost my focus on what's important here. What's important is to paint a picture of how I think and view the world for real. Yes, I admit I listen to and think about music a lot, therefore I like to write about it a lot. But I need to remember why I started ramping up the blog posts in the first place. It was supposed to entertain, not scold or inform. I mean, it can inform sometimes, just not all the time.

So here is my pledge to write more posts like this or this. Less like this and this.

Thanks for reading!

I Can Clearly See Your Nuts

I saw something the other day while driving home from bringing my wife to work. I was one of those things like what I saw back in March when I was driving, when I saw something for a brief moment and was inspired to write an entire blog about it. Well that happened again. This time, it was a little bit more profound.

I was going over the overpass on Rosa L. Parks Boulevard off the I-65 exit when I saw a man walking towards me. He looked very shabby and one would have to assume by his appearance that he was homeless. I don't want to immediately say for sure that he was homeless because I don't have proof. Anyway as I looked closer at him, I realized his pants were falling down as he was walking. I could also clearly see his nuts. What struck me was that he didn't seem to care all that much. It made me imagine what he had gone through in his life to get to the point where you can be walking on a busy road with cars everywhere and have your balls hanging out and not care about it. On the other hand, he could have mental issues, and therefore has no filter for such things, but this also cannot be confirmed because I didn't talk to him. I try not to talk to people that have their balls hanging out. Not that I think I'm better than someone who has their balls hanging out, but if he's walking down a busy road, but I just think that would be an uncomfortable situation.

To be at a point where you're private parts are just not so private anymore, that's where he appeared to be. It helped me focus on what's really important in life. It helps me to realize that where I am in life is not so bad. It obviously could be much worse.